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Wildfire ravage Greece and Turkey.
Over 400 individual fires are blazing across Greece. The United Kingdom and France have each sent a contingent of firefighters to supplement Greek firefighting efforts.
Residents of the island of Evia, the second largest island in Greece, were evacuated by ferry. Firefighters continued to battle blazes across Greece on Saturday after another difficult night that saw thousands more people fleeing their homes and hundreds being evacuated by sea, as southern Europe grapples with one of its worst heat waves in decades.
Wildfires are also still raging in Turkey, which is in its 11th day of trying to extinguish flames that are ravaging its southern coastline and that have killed at least eight people and destroyed hundreds of acres of land.
High winds in Greece hampered nighttime firefighting efforts on Friday as wildfires tore through swaths of forestland north of Athens, the capital, and through mountains and farmland on the island of Evia and on the southern Peloponnese peninsula. Evia is directly north of Athens.
During a visit to a fire control center in Athens, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said that it had been a "nightmarish summer."
Temperatures have been above 40°C (104°F) all week. Turkey has seen wildfires raging across the country throughout July. The Economist reported that nearly 160,000 hectares (~618 square miles) of forest have burned in Turkey this year, four times the annual average from 2008 to 2020
